The mania of the Castillos

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Monthly Archives: December 2016

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Our favorite Christmas tradition is attending the Gingerbread House Workshop hosted by Kidsquest Museum, and between illness and Thanksgiving and finishing out my quarter at school, we missed it. I couldn’t see us let the Christmas season go by without decorating a gingerbread house, so we decided to do it at home. Sam invited two close friends (and a sibling of one) over to decorate houses, and we got to work. We could have bought kits, but I decided to try baking them myself. I found some measurements for the pieces online and measured everything out on some cardstock. Sam helped by cutting out the pieces. Next, we taped together the cardstock to make sure everything fit together. We made a few adjustments (shortening the roof and ditching the chimney), and then got started. I made 4 batches of gingerbread so that we would have enough pieces for 6 houses (4 kids + 2 extras, just in case). It was a lot of rolling and baking, but it was also fun. Sam looked forward to it all week, saying that Saturday would be a very special day and he was going to love it. Dave expertly assembled the houses on Friday night, and everything was ready for Saturday.

Santa’s Sleigh Centerpiece

Alas, two of our guests got sick and could not come to the party, so we ended up with four extra houses. Dave, Sam, and I each decorated our own. Sam decorated another one this morning, and we’ve got one still undecorated. We decided to display them on the ledge above our kitchen:

The party didn’t turn out quite the way Sam had hoped, but we did have fun and we’ll probably try again next year. Sam wants to make a two-story house next time. Specifically, he wants to make a house that looks like the one across the street from us.